Australian government was providing top-level consular support to an Australian television crew facing charges after being caught up in a mother's bungled child-snatching attempt in Lebanon, Australia's prime minister said on Wednesday.

An Australian mother, a four-member TV crew from Nine Network, two British agents from the Britain-based Child Abduction Recovery International company, known as CARI, and two Lebanese men have been in police custody since two Lebanese-Australian siblings Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, were snatched from a South Beirut bus stop last week in a bid to smuggle them out of the country.

U.S. authorities have said that an Ohio man has pleaded guilty in federal court to a charge related to the sale of 300 guns, including 11 destined for Beirut.

Forty-eight-year-old Richfield Township resident Timothy Cassinger pleaded guilty Tuesday in Akron to a single count of unlicensed gun dealing.

Greece and its bailout creditors have suspended talks on the country's austerity program until next week, after a new set of marathon overnight negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough.

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos says the meetings in Athens would resume April 18, with an aim to reaching an agreement by April 22, when he is due to meet with his peers from the 19-country eurozone.

A senior Palestinian official with the mainstream Fatah Movement was killed on Tuesday in a car bombing in the southern city of Sidon.

Reports said that Fathi Zaidan died and four others, including two bodyguards, were injured in the blast near Ain el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp.

One North Korean who worked abroad says that as a waitress in China, she was forced to put up with male customers who groped her and tried to get her drunk. Two others recall the frozen bodies of their countrymen stored in Russian logging camps. Another says he toiled for up to 16 hours a day at a Kuwaiti construction site surrounded by wire fences.

As difficult as those lives were, the four workers told The Associated Press, it beat staying in the North. The jobs actually conveyed status back home, and were so coveted that people used bribes and family connections to get them.

A contractor said Tuesday that he negotiated with an Australian television network to snatch two Lebanese-Australian children from their father's family in Beirut but the network chose a cheaper option.

Col Chapman, who describes himself as a child recovery specialist, said executives at the Nine Network's "60 Minutes" program told him to "sharpen his pencil" when he quoted them 150,000 Australian dollars ($114,000) late last year to get the children Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, out of Lebanon.

Paris police say protesters angry over a labor reform damaged stores and restaurants and injured two police officers during a rogue overnight march.

Thousands of people have been gathering for the past 11 nights at the Place de la Republique to express frustration at a bill extending the workweek and making layoffs easier. The fledgling Occupy-style movement has expanded to include a range of grievances and visitors from other cities and countries.

Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy never met, but the author's most extensive personal collection is housed at JFK's presidential library and is now on public display.

The exhibition opening this week in Boston includes original manuscripts of some of his most famous literary works; letters to other major literary figures of his time; photographs and other personal mementos.

To dump or not to dump a little-discussed substance is the question brewing in Japan as it grapples with the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima five years ago. The substance is tritium.

The radioactive material is technically near-impossible to remove from the huge quantities of water used to cool melted-down reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, which was wrecked by the massive tsunami in northeastern Japan in March 2011.

North Korea has tried warnings of nuclear attack and racist diatribes to criticize U.S. President Barack Obama. Now it's turning to Abraham Lincoln.

North Korea's state media have constructed an imaginary letter from the 16th U.S. president that attacks Obama's "deception" over Pyongyang's pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is the latest response from the North to rising animosity with Washington following Pyongyang's nuclear test and long-range rocket launch earlier this year.